Gigibaba, Melbourne restaurant review

Author: John Lethlean
Photography: Tim James

This restaurant has closed.

It's Sunday evening, Smith Street, the quintessential inner-city
artery leading north from the city through Collingwood. Graffiti is
everywhere and promotional music posters plaster just about every
piece of wall or hoarding that hasn't been aerosoled. And a couple
of pissed blokes have emerged from a bluestone pub to have a
lukewarm go at beating each other up. Keep walking, darling, and
whatever you do, don't stare.

It may be 2009, but Smith Street is defiantly resisting the
gentrification of its backstreets, the apartmentisation of its
warehouses, the professionalisation of its knocking shops and
shooting parlours. What better place for the perversely media-shy
and prodigiously talented chef Ismail Tosun, standard-bearer of
new-millennium Turkish food in this country, to hang his shingle?
Not that it's particularly well hung, so to speak.

You could walk past one of the most exciting eating houses in
Melbourne today without even noticing Gigibaba and the hubbub
within; Tosun, clearly, does not like drawing attention to
himself.

It's all about the food.

Inside, at a broad white marble bar your average pastry chef would
kill for, I ask the barman how Smith Street is treating them. It's
only 6.30pm, after all; the usual evening crush and that peculiar
juggling act known as the 'no bookings' policy are still an hour
off, and he has time to indulge my curiosity.

He points to a newly installed coat rack near the front door and
tells the story of recent diners - well-heeled foodies, it seems -
who hung their jackets on the way in. When it was time to go, what
with all the comings and goings of so many throughout the night,
their garments were nowhere to be seen. You've got to sell a lot of
dinners to pay for a $1900 jacket, so if you see someone dodgy
wearing Comme des Garçons around Collingwood… er, don't approach
them. And don't ask where they got the jacket.

Welcome to Smith Street.

Ismail Tosun - the name's Turkish, and that's important - grew up
in Melbourne but, as a chef, made a name for himself in
Perth. Such a name, in fact, that in 2006 he was awarded
Gourmet Traveller's Best New Talent award. And then?
Tosun, and the restaurant he made his name in, Eminem,
disappeared.

Fast-forward a few years and Tosun is back on home turf in
Melbourne with a new back-to-basics wine and food bar venture,
Gigibaba. With table seating for 25 in a space lit by a string of
oversized low-wattage bulbs, you'd hesitate to call it a restaurant
as such. And really, does it matter?

Some of the past year's best eating in Melbourne seems to have
happened at places where diners are more likely to have had their
bottoms on a stool than on a padded chair or banquette. Gigibaba -
an affectionate term for Tosun's grandmother - is a distillation of
all those wine-savvy, shared-dish, small-portion, dine-at-the-bar
restaurants that have emerged recently.

And, like MoMo's Greg Malouf, The Press Club's George Calombaris,
Maha's Shane Delia or Rumi's Joseph Abboud, Ismail Tosun is a
second-generation innovator. He venerates his culture and its food,
but he also recognises the need to convey it in a modern way that
builds food up to a standard, not down to a price. And,
notwithstanding pioneers of Ottoman cuisine such as Greg Malouf and
Serif Kaya, Tosun is part of a new generation determined to drag
the cuisine of his parents' homeland out of the peasant ranks (from
a public perception point of view) and into another realm of
respectability in this country.

Gigibaba has the potential to be not only a very enjoyable
restaurant but an important one too.

Arrive early. Sit at the bar if you're up for some dialogue with
the indefatigably perky staff (if not, try for a table),
order an Efes pilsener from Istanbul and take a look at that menu.
If you know some Turkish you'll be fine, but without it, be
prepared for a whole new vocabulary: kizartma, fasulye, pastirma,
kassar… It's exciting but also a little daunting.

Those staff - who seem the essence of cool but surprisingly
without a hint of attitude - seem happy to explain, over and over
and over. One of the things they keep explaining, too, is the 'no
bookings' policy. It takes someone with real people-skills to
manage it when things are pretty hectic around the doorway. At one
point, a waiter beseeched a visitor at the door: "This is what
we're all about, spontaneity."

I beg to differ: Gigibaba is all about food of rare finesse that
follows universal themes of freshness, balance, harmony, textural
juxtaposition, quality produce and very careful cooking.

Whimsical floral-patterned plates bear small portions of familiar
yet refreshingly new appetisers, mezze, including Tosun's own
garlicky, fenugreek-spiced pastirma: air-dried beef that is
Turkey's most renowned cured meat. It's his first batch, we hear,
hung for three weeks in the cellar beneath the restaurant. Thinly
sliced, it has a wonderful, waxy texture, a deep crimson
translucency and a length to its flavour I've never encountered
before.

There's house-made hummus with the texture of crushed velvet,
dressed with some chopped parsley, olive oil and sumac; baba
ghanoush, scattered with walnuts, parsley and oil; and house-made
rye bread crusted with black sesame seeds. From the first taste,
you'll realise that these are flavours and textures that take time
and quality produce to achieve.

The mezze selection is available for two or four diners; a
collection of small, mainly meat dishes is offered as either two or
four pieces; and the menu finishes with about eight mid-sized
dishes.

Tosun's version of imam bayildi, Turkey's most famous dish,
combines the soft textures of eggplant, onion, different peppers
and herbs with tomato and garlic and goat's curd and mysterious
spices. It looks a bit of a mess; it looks oily. It's
neither.

In Turquoise, Greg's Malouf's book about Turkey, he says
that, at the risk of oversimplification, Turkish food can be
divided into Ottoman (the food of the urban affluent) and Anatolian
(that of the rural poor). Tosun's twice-marinated 'Ottoman-style
quail' is something special with a sticky, salty, golden skin,
perfectly moist flesh and a kind of salad of lightly vinegared
eggplant and marrow slices, roasted cherry tomato quarters and torn
pieces of Italian basil.

A salad of diced cucumber, red onion, tomato and parsley, all
dressed with lemon, olive oil and what I'm assuming to be
house-made yoghurt, encapsulates many of the flavours and
ingredients of the cuisine.

Gigibaba lamb cutlets that come to the bar on a plate with
precisely nothing to keep them company are testament to the chef's
confidence in his seasoning. Bashed flat, they are barbecued over
hot coals with a black sea salt and wild oregano rub that
transports you to a sun-drenched place very far away.
Brilliant.

If you're smart, you'll look for some of the slightly more modern
dishes that lurk on (and off) the menu. Dishes like a 'sandwich' of
grilled salmon, thinly sliced from the fillet, with a paste-like
filling of Jerusalem artichoke, kassar cheese and pine nuts.

My personal favourite, the dish closest to a 'composed' restaurant
offering I've seen from Tosun's kitchen, is the squab pigeon. It's
a rare - and I do mean rare - roasted cinnamon and Antep
chilli-rubbed breast and leg that shows impeccable cooking-time
judgement, the seasoned, grainy dark exterior of the bird
contrasting with the burgundy-coloured flesh within. It's served
with a light, pigeon stock-based sauce, a hazelnut and beetroot
salad and, on top, an individual, triangle-shaped pastilla of
cinnamon-infused almonds and squab meat, garnished with a dollop of
Jerusalem artichoke.

This is very special stuff; modern cooking with a real sense of
provenance. And, indeed, the man behind the bar will have something
you'll probably want to drink with such special food, even if the
selection of continentals and locals is small. And he'll make every
wine available in either a 120ml glass, a 300ml chemistry flask or
a 500ml version. They even sell bottles.

Being a rather quixotic kind of place - the kind of place that
sees answering phone calls and clearing voicemail as optional
business practices - there's no dessert list. If you want something
sweet, it's entirely at the kitchen's discretion at $8 a person for
three to four pieces. Let me tell you, you'll want something
sweet.

Dessert could be a sublime lokma, yeasted and fried batter a Greek
would liken to loukoumades or an Italian to zeppoli, but here it's
swamped with a hot, golden syrup laced with lemon juice, citrus
rind and crushed pistachio. It's a bittersweet sensation. It could
be a pot of almond and ground rice pudding with fresh cherry
segments and ground walnut; it might be Gigibaba's own version of
baklava, the best I've ever tasted; even a little Turkish coffee
truffle (perfect, really, with its namesake); or an unusual
layering of cassis, yoghurt, cassis-poached prune, crushed walnut
and dreadlock shavings of bitter chocolate over the top.

But what's more exciting than this is the likelihood that next
time round there'll be a completely different set of dishes, both
on and off the menu. Like the waiter said, they're all about
spontaneity. Go prepared for the unusual and you may come away
grinning. Just remember to keep your coat on.